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Awesome MedLib Blog: PubMed Search Strategies

This kind of blog is sooooo useful to searchers like me who are clearly less experienced and expert than the author of PubMed Search Strategies, Cindy Schmidt, M.D., M.L.S.

“This blog has been created to share PubMed search strategies. Search strategies posted here are not perfect. They are posted in the hope that others will benefit from the work already put into their creation and/or will offer suggestions for improvements. Librarians who wish to post comments on this blog or who wish to become authors are invited to e-mail me.”

3 thoughts on “Awesome MedLib Blog: PubMed Search Strategies”

Am I missing something? I’m not sure the extensive free text searching is worthwhile for many of the common terms and limiters she covers – at least as applies to Medline/PubMed. for Google, sure. But for PubMed, which already has limiters for Male and Female, etc… (And king OR kings OR duke* or prince or princes? Huh??? You’ll get Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Center, or Duke University or Prince Edward Island. I can’t imagine ever finding an abstract or title in PubMed about a study on nobility. Why not include “czar OR czars OR tzar OR tzars” as well?! I will admit that some of the term strings could be useful – I wasn’t familiar with the term abbatoir, French for slaughterhouse – possibly useful for searching the Canadian literature regarding the meat packing industry (as per Dr. Schmidt’s example.